The Musings of the Kat

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 10 Mar 2006 08:49:00 GMT

Our old boss is leaving the company in disgrace. Normally disgrace involves immediate absence, however we like to drag out the agony as long as contractually possible. The same seems to be happening with one of our sales team who, post-resignation is still "selling" the company's wares. Oh well, ours not to reason why!

On the positive side, we have a new chap taking over with a wider remit. At the moment he is meeting with each member of the team to get an overview of the current state of affairs.

The meetings have varied in length from an hour or so to a day and a half. This would seem to indicate some variation in either the amount of issues each person has with the company or the faith each person has that their comments will not be used in evidence against them.

From my experience, I'm inclined to believe that no one starts a new job intending anything other than to make improvements. Of course, what is an improvement from the perspective of the company is not always an improvement for the employee.

Here's to interesting times! I'm positive about the future, but not self deluding enough to believe it will be easy.

Posted by Kat Crichton Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:45:00 GMT

Phew! My ISP upgraded to Rails 1.0, which knocked the version of Typo I've been using for six. I probably ought to put the correct version of Rails into the vendor folder to stop it happening again.

I decided to start using the Subversion release. I normally wouldn't trust code that's non-release, but since Typo seems to be written test first, I have a lot more confidence in it's ability to stay unbroken by new code.

Anyway, after some struggle converting my old data into the new format - including trouble installing MySQL Server 4, I'm up and running again.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 13 Jan 2006 12:30:00 GMT

Found a nice little project that transcodes MythTV .nuv files to iPod video and provides them as a subscribable podcast feed.

Unfortunately it relies on the xvid support in the latest version of ffmpeg (only available through CVS), that doesn't want to compile on my FC3 machine. Will post if and when I get it working.

Posted by Kat Crichton Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:01:00 GMT

Managed the upgrade to version 1 without any major hitches. Just two notable differences...

• The AJAX stuff is fixed (which stopped us from upgrading to the last release).
• ActiveRecord has slightly stricter constraints on creation of new objects with has_and_belongs_to_many relationships.

The ActiveRecord change means that you can't create a new object and it's join table based relationships without first saving the main object. If object has_and_belongs_to_many relations, then...

object = Object.new
object.relations << relation
object.save

object = Object.create 
object.relations << relation

It makes some sense, since the identity of object has not yet been created, but it's a bit of a shame that the ORM layer can't hide these issues from you.

Posted by Kat Crichton Mon, 02 Jan 2006 06:51:00 GMT

...and a happy new year to you all.

Penny gave me an 60GB iPod Video for christmas, which I have been playing with constantly.

So far, I've got my main MythTV server running an iTunes server (DAAP), so that anyone using iTunes on my LAN can browse my MP3 collection. It was pretty easy using Dag's APT repo, I've written a quick walkthrough to help you along.

My next little project will be to get MythTV automatically converting certain TV programs to iPod compatible MP4 video files.

Posted by Kat Crichton Sat, 24 Dec 2005 06:19:00 GMT

Got an ariel guy to come and fit a decent wideband ariel, which made all the difference. MythTV automatically scanned for and found loads of free TV channels - Woo!

Now I can do picture in picture as well as recording 2 channels at once or watching one channel while recording another.

It's not quite clear how it chooses which tuner to use and the <C> key doesn't switch between them as I expected it to.

It's still way cool though and the quality of the freeview programs is substantially better. The tuner card just saves the demultiplexed MPEG stream straight to the hard disk rather than reencoding the video that's already been decoded by the NTL Cable box.

The only other problem so far is that I can't play back the Freeview video files on a PC using MythTV Filters. Guess I'll have to do a little codec research.

Posted by Kat Crichton Wed, 30 Nov 2005 06:28:00 GMT

Just got back from XPday5 where my colleague Dafydd Rees and I presented a talk on Rails for Real. It seems to have gone down well and a lot of delegates were interested in learning more about our experiences using Ruby-on-Rails for a major project.

I very nearly didn't make it up to London at all having contracted a nasty stomach bug or flu at the weekend, which returned shortly after the talk. Thankfully adrenalin kicked in for the duration.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 25 Nov 2005 21:00:00 GMT

Penny bought me a Red Letter Day for my birthday in March, a driving day at Thruxton Racecourse, Wiltshire. I was of course thoroughly looking forward to some seriously fast cars to play with.

Rachel Elnaugh (the only female dragon in Dragon's Den on TV) made her fortune by starting up Red Letter Days. The company offer a range of once-in-a-lifetime gift experiences.

Half way through the summer, the news came that Red Letter Days was going into liquidation. We waited with baited breath for any news. Finally some came. Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis (Rachel's fellow dragons) stepped in to rescue the company.

I'm happy to report that they honoured my voucher.

The day started with a briefing that lasted longer than usual as the drivers were out on the track to drive the smattering of snow off the track. This allowed us a little more time learning the track and the passing rules that make it safe to drive different types of car together.

It wasn't long before I was heading out in the Mazda RX-8 for my first laps as a passenger, then as a driver. The Mazda is quite a car, with a rotary engine producing 230bph. The track is straightforward apart from two tight corners near the start and a chicane just before the entrance to the pit lane. After a few laps I'd started to learn the right entry and exit points for the corners.

The driving from this point on was almost non-stop, straight into the Mercedes SLK, a larger similarly powered car for a few laps. The Mercedes is pretty easy to drive, but the extra size helped pave the way toward next car. I found myself straying a little close to the cones on the left, as I'd got straight out of a smaller car.

Next up was the Ferrari 360. I've loved Ferrari's since I was a kid (who didn't?) and this for me, was what the whole day was about. It's a phenomenal car, just ten days out of the factory. The engine sounded like an angry tiger when I touched the accelerator a little incautiously.

Kat in the F360 Modena

The laps whizzed by. I was as amazed by the braking into the corners and the acceleration out onto the straights. I'm no less enamoured of Ferrari's than I was and it's still an ambition to own one.

Stepping out of the Ferrari, I didn't think that the experience could be topped; but it could, by the Formula Renault, a single-seat, rear engine racecar. Sitting a couple of inches above the ground, fully kitted out with balaclava, helmet, rubber gripped gloves and booties, the steering wheel is slotted in after you've been fitted into the car like a tailored suit.

It's like having an engine strapped to your back and wheels to your feet. Huge amounts of grip stick you to the road and the car reacts instantly to acceleration and steering. The six laps in this car felt more like a race, with the pumping adrenalin and wind in your face. You get out of the car exhausted and exhilarated.

I had to be reminded by the debrief instructor about the last drive - one fast lap with a professional driver. Gone in seconds, this lap lets you know just how incredibly slowly you've been driving so far.

At debrief I was delighted that I'd scored higher than average for my driving. What a day! I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 18 Nov 2005 12:40:00 GMT

I managed to give myself a mild case of trigger finger at the weekend. It's caused by a swollen tendon catching on it's sheath and shows up as a jerking movement between extended and curled.

I didn't get it by going on a shooting spree or by playing too many video games. It seems to have been caused by using the secateurs too much in the garden.

Posted by Kat Crichton Fri, 18 Nov 2005 09:26:00 GMT

Right, the card is installed but not tuning yet. I think I might need an extra signal booster or perhaps a higher gain ariel.

The drivers took a bit of sorting out, as Fedora Core 3 doesn't automatically create the DVB devices.

The only problem so far was a conflict with the nVidia drivers which caused the display to hang. To solve this I swapped the card for an ATI Radeon 7000 from another box.